If you’ve spent an unhealthy amount of time browsing through TikTok or YouTube after midnight, you’ve probably seen one of the many weird things people are watching on the internet: videos of doctors removing huge plugs of earwax with hoover attachments.
It sounds gross but these clips have been watched tens of millions of times per year. Welcome to the micro-suction revolution, the seemingly mundane clinical procedure that went viral. So what is this wondrous technique and what exactly does it do?
Put simply, micro-suction is the most effective way to clean out your ears and a major improvement on the older technique of washing out your ears with water, which can be messy and is only effective for some types of earwax build-up. Beyond that, the added benefits of micro-suction are that it’s fast and dry. For Ear Wax Removal Swindon, contact www.earwax.co.uk/ear-wax-removal-near-me/swindon/
Given how effective micro-suction is, it’s little wonder that it has captured the hearts and minds of so many. But why did videos showing such a mundane, if important, procedure go viral? According to the psychologists, they are an expression of a strange new phenomenon that they call ‘the oddly satisfying’. It’s an internet subculture where people get kicks out of the video representation of two conflicting states of disarray being sorted out. Watching a micro-suction video is like seeing a plug of earwax form, then being whisked away. It gives you a sense of resolution. And yet there are many benefits to watching these videos. For one thing, they make us think about our ears.
In most cases, we don’t think about our ears at all – we just take for granted that they are in good working order until we can’t hear anything. The micro-suction video is a potent reminder of a body part that we normally forget exists. When you press play for those 10 seconds, the earwax, the suction tube and the inside of the ear canal come alive.